Monday, 24 October 2011

Nauta´s Mini Mythology - Callisto / Mini Mitología de Nauta - Calisto

Nauta

I missed seeing you in September because I was on holiday in a cabin in the woods with my wife. We made friends with some bears who insisted I feature Ursa Major and Ursa Minor on this blog. I want to do it before they go hibernate, which will happen any day now. So here goes.

There once was a beautiful young lady named Callisto who caught the eye of Zeus, king of the gods. He managed to trick her into having an affair with him. This put her in the black list of Hera, Zeus´ wife.

Now Callisto was a friend of the moon goddess Artemis, and to avoid what might happen if Hera confronted Callisto, Artemis had the great idea of turning the poor girl into a bear. But before that, Callisto had given birth to a son by Zeus.

Hera eventually discovered that Callisto had become a bear. By then, Callisto´s son, whose name was Arcas, was old enough to go hunting, and Hera would have watched him unwittingly shoot his mother without blinking if Zeus hadn´t intervened.

What Zeus did was grab hold of mother and child and toss them up to the heavens where they landed among the stars. There Callisto made friends with Helice, who had been one of Zeus´ nannies and whom he had allowed to live in the firmament as a reward for having looked after him.

Both agreed to share a constellation with the form of a bear. It is called Ursa Major because Helice´s sister, Cynosura, occupied a smaller but also bear-shaped constellation, known as Ursa Minor. As for Arcas, he went to live among a group of stars named after Bootes, the agricultural god of the plough.

Two images of constellations follow, one of the Big Bear and another of the Little Bear, who is with a third constellation called Draco, the dragon. The famous North Star, also called Polaris, is part of the second. It is fundamental in celestial navigation because it is the only star that stands quite still.